The possibility of life on other worlds has stirred the human imagination and stimulated scientific curiosity for as long as people have been looking up at the sky. From Aristotle to Star Trek to the latest pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope, the examination of this age-old question continues to arouse profound excitement and has found expression in human culture from the first cosmologies to the latest theories about the origin of life -- in oral tradition, literature, and film, and in the rapidly developing disciplines of astrobiology, space exploration, and extrasolar planet detection
The possibility of life on other worlds has stirred the human imagination and stimulated scientific curiosity for as long as people have been looking up at the sky. From Aristotle to Star Trek to the latest pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope, the examination of this age-old question continues to arouse profound excitement and has found expression in human culture from the first cosmologies to the latest theories about the origin of life -- in oral tradition, literature, and film, and in the rapidly developing disciplines of astrobiology, space exploration, and extrasolar planet detection
Includes bibliographical references (pages 473-494)